Laguna Art Museum Dives into 'The Sea Around Us' During 10th Annual Art & Nature Festival

Laguna Art Museum (LAM) will present its 10th annual Art & Nature, a multidisciplinary exploration and celebration of art's various engagements with the natural world, beginning November 3. The multi-faceted event is the museum's largest public program of the year, bringing together thousands of participants to foster a love of nature, raise environmental awareness, and discover cross-sections between science and the arts.

"This year's 10th annual Art & Nature Festival will once again bring the community together to appreciate the intimate connection between art and nature," said Julie Perlin Lee, Executive Director of Laguna Art Museum. "The festival celebrates the museum's long-standing history as a cultural center, offering in-depth programming and impactful exhibitions that honor the rich history of California art."

Rebeca Méndez returns to Art & Nature as the featured artist with her newest project The Sea Around Us, which will make its debut in the museum's historic Steele Gallery on November 5. Creating an immersive 360-degree video art installation, The Sea Around Us will transport viewers to an area of the Pacific Ocean located 30 miles from the Laguna Beach Coast, portraying the ocean as a fully animated body as well as a place of deep interconnectedness for all living things. Using scientific footage, the video shifts to thousands of oozing barrels of DDT on the seafloor being sampled by robotic arms. This hidden ecological calamity is revealed in conjunction with imagery that inspires awe and strengthens the bond between sea and viewer, inspiring the courage to face environmental wrongdoing, to take restorative action, and to avoid repeating transgressions against our natural resources.

Presenting the first outdoor exhibition since 2020, LAM will bring Kelly Berg's Pyramidion to the City of Laguna Beach November 3-6. Pyramidion is an interactive sculptural experience inviting contemplation of the layered history and unique geology of Laguna Beach. Beginning at the museum, participants will journey to several sites through the local park and beaches, encountering pyramids of various sizes and colors that reflect the ever-shifting nature of the landscape. The temporality of the installation parallels much of the earth's landscapes that shift and change due to weather, geology, and the effects of climate change.

On display in the California Gallery starting November 3 will be Robert Young's The Big One, which is thought to still hold the record as the largest painting ever created in Laguna Beach. As a resident of Laguna Beach, Young began his 9-by-15-foot painting in 1971 and continued to work on the piece throughout his life.

Additional Art & Nature festival programming includes the First Thursdays Art Walk, a keynote lecture from National Geographic Society Explorer in Residence Dr. Sylvia Earle, and the annual free Family Festival.

Continuing Laguna Beach's legacy as a center for the arts, Art & Nature provides a unique opportunity for the Southern California community to come together for a festival of art and ideas, to inspire artists, and enhance the appreciation of nature as a place that inspires awareness about the environment we share.

About the Artists

Rebeca Méndez is an artist, designer and chair of the Design Media Arts department at UCLA, where she is also director of the CounterForce Lab. Her research and practice investigate design and media art in public spaces, critical approaches to public identities and landscape and artistic projects based on field investigation methods. In addition to her many great permanent public commissions, including two for the Metro Art Crenshaw/LAX project and three for the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Méndez's work is represented in numerous public and private collections. Among them are the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Oaxaca in Mexico, the El Paso Museum of Art and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. From 2017 through 2019 she served as selecting committee member for the Pritzker Emerging Environmental Genius Award.

Kelly Berg is a Los Angeles based artist who creates paintings and mixed media sculptural works that explore the ever-shifting nature of our world. Known for her compositions depicting the movement of tectonic plates, volcanic eruptions and dramatic geologic formations, Berg's works offer a new perspective within the context of contemporary landscape and the sublime. The integration of geometric forms within her compositions and the reoccurring imagery of pyramids emerging from dark rifts in the earth create a visual framework that symbolizes a convergence of the human and natural worlds.

Berg received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. Her work has been presented in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout Southern California and is included in major private and corporate collections. Berg was invited to be an artist-in-residence at the Art 1307 Cultural Institution in Naples, Italy (2019) and at Boxo Projects in Joshua Tree, CA (2021). During both artist residencies she created works in dialogue with the unique geologic features specific to those areas; Mount Vesuvius volcano and Joshua Tree National Park respectively.

An avid scuba diver and ocean lover, Robert Young worked on his magnum opus for decades adding colorful fish, pristine reef, coral and other sea life onto the canvas of his piece The Big One. The painting was displayed at Sea World, but eventually came back to Laguna Beach in 2013. Young was an artist / painter extraordinaire who lived, loved, and worked in Laguna Beach for most of his life and was one of the founders of the beloved Laguna Beach Sawdust Art Festival. It was his love for the sea that inspired much of his work as an artist. Young connected with the ocean as a young boy while playing in the surf near his family's seaside trailer at El Moro. He spent time there as a lifeguard at Scotchman's Cove and as luck would have it, he served his tour of duty as a marine in Hawaii where his interest with the ocean and its inhabitants continued to grow. As a young man, he logged hundreds of hours under the water exploring countless coves along the coast, diving for dinner at day's end, or just observing the wonders that lived beneath the surface.

Keynote Speaker

From Mission-Blue.org: National Geographic Society Explorer in Residence Dr. Sylvia A. Earle, called Her Deepness by The New Yorker and The New York Times, Living Legend by the Library of Congress, and first Hero for the Planet by Time Magazine, is an oceanographer, explorer, author and lecturer with experience as a field research scientist, government official, and director for corporate and non-profit organizations including the Kerr McGee Corporation, Dresser Industries, Oryx Energy, the Aspen Institute, the Conservation Fund, American Rivers, Mote Marine Laboratory, Duke University Marine Laboratory, Rutgers Institute for Marine Science, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, National Marine Sanctuary Foundation, and Ocean Futures.

Formerly Chief Scientist of NOAA, Dr. Earle is the Founder of Deep Ocean Exploration and Research, Inc. (DOER), Founder of the Sylvia Earle Alliance (S.E.A.) / Mission Blue, Chair of the Advisory Council of the Harte Research Institute, inspiration for the ocean in Google Earth, leader of the NGS Sustainable Seas Expeditions, and the subject of the 2014 Netflix film, Mission Blue. She has a B.S. degree from Florida State University, M.S. and PhD. from Duke University, 27 honorary degrees and has authored more than 200 scientific, technical and popular publications including 13 books (most recently Blue Hope in 2014), lectured in more than 90 countries, and appeared in hundreds of radio and television productions.

She has led more than 100 expeditions and logged more than 7,000 hours underwater including leading the first team of women aquanauts during the Tektite Project in 1970, participating in ten saturation dives, most recently in July 2012, and setting a record for solo diving in 1,000 meters depth. Her research concerns marine ecosystems with special reference to exploration, conservation and the development and use of new technologies for access and effective operations in the deep sea and other remote environments.

For more information about Art & Nature and Laguna Art Museum, visit lagunaartmuseum.org. To stay connected and learn about upcoming events, follow the museum on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.